The goal of hosting and participating in a webinar is to increase awareness and encourage knowledge sharing. This platform can be widely adapted to various businesses and organizations. Following this logic, it only makes sense to see more and more webinars popping up in the sport industry.
With social media and internet marketing becoming the norm, there are quite an array of tools at your disposal to allow you to interact in various ways. Think of each as using the proper club when playing golf. Each situation on the course has its own unique solution, just like your presentation. Like golf clubs, interactive tools can serve your presentations in many different ways.
You need to pick the interactive tool that works best for the type of conversation you want to have with your audience. Before getting into the different value of each type of webinar, take a look at the three basic kinds of interactive conversations:
• Presenter to audience: Basically, this is a talking head seen by the audience on their screen. This is a great option for presenting factual information and gives a more traditional educational approach.
• Audience to presenter: Whether it’s responding to a poll or asking a question during the Q&A portion of the presentation, the participant plays an active role in the live webinar. This type of webinar benefits those who learn by engagement and gives you a better connection with your audience, to ensure they are getting the most out of the learning opportunity.
• Audience to audience: Your participants can communicate with one another through social media during the presentation using Twitter and Facebook, for example. The group chat widget facilitates communication within the environment, too. Webinars that allow peer-to-peer communication help bring together various communities with a common goal. This is a fantastic way to host a roundtable discussion and create buzz around your topic.
Important factors to consider when determining whether a webinar is the best medium for your needs, include your audience, the subject matter, and the time you’ll need to cover your topic. If you’re addressing a small, internal audience of colleagues about a new organizational goal, for example, a webinar may be a less appropriate option than it would be for a training seminar for a larger audience of clients and funders. Keep in mind that most online audiences tend to lose interest after about two hours, consequently, ensure you organize your topics and information so they can adequately be covered within this timeframe.
Technological advancement has enabled us to have more tools and resources at our disposal to get our message out and also learn from others in our field. Hosting a webinar is a great way to incorporate the latest technology and provide your audience current and useful information.